We’re about to send two of our least effective instruments of power to the Middle East: Patriot Missile batteries and Condi Rice.
And oh, yeah, 21,500 more troops.
No one seems to seriously think Mr. Bush’s escalation strategy will work, including, one gets the distinct impression, Mr. Bush himself.
The Works
That depends, of course, on what your definition of “works” is. If you mean something along the lines of “restore order to Iraq, disband the militias, unify the government and rebuild the country,” no, that’s not going to work.
If you mean: “escalate and expand the war throughout the region,” yeah, that will work. It’s working already.
The “surge” is underway. ABC reports that elements of the 82nd Airborne Division arrived in Baghdad on Wednesday.
U.S. forces have raided the Iranian consulate in the Iraqi city of Erbil and arrested five members of its staff. It looks like that’s as close as we’re going to come to conducting direct diplomacy with Iran.
Mr. Bush has ordered an additional carrier strike group to the Persian Gulf region.
We’ve conducted air raids in Somalia, ostensibly in an effort to kill senior al-Qaeda members suspected of being responsible for the 1998 bombing U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. CBS reports that none of the intended targets were killed. U.S. Navy ships are intercepting maritime traffic of the Somali coast, searching for al-Qaeda members attempting to flee the country.
We’ve begun to deploy F-117 stealth bombers to South Korea. An Air Force spokesman says the deployment is “part of ongoing measures to maintain a credible deterrent and presence in the West Pacific.”
Yeah.
The House and Senate are holding hearings today on the Iraq policy that Mr. Bush announced last night. I’m more than a little concerned that Congress seems so fixated by Iraq right now that they’re not paying any attention whatsoever to the escalation that’s already taking place.
Military pundit Ralph Peters of the New York Post finally figured out that the assignment of Admiral William Fallon to take charge of Central Command was all about getting tough with Iran. You know something is obvious to everyone if Peters gets it.
Here’s what gets me. Bush backers warn us that withdrawal from Iraq will cause the violence there to spread into a regional war, yet everything Bush is doing seems purposely designed to ensure that a regional war–one that spans the Horn of Africa to the Korean Peninsula–is precisely what happens.
And nobody in Congress or the mainstream media seems to be on to that yet.
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Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia. Read his commentaries at ePluribus Media and Pen and Sword.
